When David Wilstein was younger, his commercial construction career gave him some thrills that he just doesn’t get anymore.

“I miss walking around an unfinished 50-story building on the raw steel with the wind blowing through my hair,” he said. “What a rush that was.”

Wilstein, now 84, is president at Realtech Construction Co., a Century City real estate company he founded in 1967 that owns and manages more than 1.5 million square feet of commercial space in Los Angeles.

He said that going into the office each day and tackling business matters keeps his mind sharp.

“I have to keep myself busy,” he said. “I still take an active interest in my business and I like to be involved in it.”

Genetics might have something to do with it. David and his brother Leonard Wilstein both have careers spanning more than 60 years.

Leonard, 83, is president and chief executive at Aero Products Research Inc., an L.A. aviation technology company better known as APR Industries, which he founded in 1958. He said he’s too young to retire, and besides, he doesn’t consider his job work – a word that isn’t in his vocabulary.

“I never do anything I regard as work,” he said.

Each brother has an equity stake in the other’s business. Both men continue to work more than 40 hours a week, as they did in their 40s and 50s. Though instead of spending time in the field observing development projects in various stages of completion, David now spends his working hours in the office.

He played a key role in launching the prodigious real estate career of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

“I showed Don how to do his first real estate deal,” he said. “He was a young lawyer at the time. Now he probably owns somewhere between 30 and 40 buildings I had built.”

Now, David brings the energy he used to bring to construction sites to the office.

“Obviously I’m not as active as when I was younger, but mentally I can run circles around a lot of people younger than myself,” he said.

Leonard said he never played it safe. It was his daredevil tendencies that drew him to the aviation industry in the first place.

“I’ve lived a dangerous life with all the things I’ve done,” he said. “Flying, being in the service, a couple of wars. I wouldn’t call that a healthy life, but I lived the life I chose and I’d do it all over again.”

He said his “vitamins” help him stay healthy, and he takes lots of them:

“Gin, vodka,” he said. “I feel sorry for anybody who doesn’t drink, because when they get up in the morning, that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.”

– Bethany Firnhaber